


In Berlin, Honey, In Basrah

by shiplizard



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Gratuitous metaphors for american wars, Gratuitous metaphors in general, Schroedinger's Phil Coulson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 19:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/shiplizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This isn't a story about Phil secretly being a bad guy. It's a story of him secretly being friends with a bad guy. And about the way Steve Rogers' country has changed and the way even murderers still believe in heroes.  </p><p>Mostly it's about Phil's trading cards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Berlin, Honey, In Basrah

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed indulgently by [Binz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/binz), and Castle-checked by [Glazed MacGuffin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/GlazedMacGuffin)

Steve doesn't find out that there's a problem with the cards until weeks after the funeral, until after Tony's convinced him to move in to his palatial digs (Steve has his own _floor_ , he could house an entire army unit in the space that Tony has just _given him_ ) and until everyone else has drifted in, piece by piece and bag by bag and one left-behind item at a time. 

It's surprising how quick he adapts to these strangers-- or if it isn't surprising, he wants to pretend it is, that he's not so desperate and lonely and out of his element in this century that he's grabbing for friends and family out of the first grab-bag of geniuses, soldiers and spies he's given to work with. 

He thought that it would grate on him, playing house with the rest of the Avengers when there wasn't an emergency threatening Earth or at least the New York shaped section of it-- and there hasn't been, the world holding its breath since the invasion, until someone exhales and starts doing something stupid again. But it's been surprisingly homey. Barton's happy to walk him through the movies he's missed, throwing something new at him every night. Tony is nearly tolerable sometimes when he isn’t reminding Steve of Howard, which he barely does anymore. Bruce keeps him company when he can’t sleep, makes him tea with spices he doesn’t recognize, never blames him for who he was and what that’s meant for Bruce himself. When Thor gets back from Tromso he's promised to do some sparring, and Natasha is kind to him and sits him down to give him what he thinks just might be a slightly biased summation of the Cold War. He needed that, biases and all, it's better than trying to read it off some dry website where everyone assumes you know everything from the ground up...

Anyway, it's quiet, it's friendly, he's trying not to think of it of home. And as much as he's trying to keep a little distance, he barely thinks twice anymore about coming down to the lab to ask Tony or Bruce something. The two men don't even break conversational stride as he comes in with the TIMES he wants to pester Tony about.

"--the most _deliberately useless_ blood samples ever. Nothing could be this inert by accident-"

"They're old, Tony, there's acid in the paper. And it's not like there was time to--" 

"Oh, please. SHIELD probably has this stuff lying around in squirt bottles for whenever they need to fake an industrial accent. Forensically Baffling Fast Drying Blood, trademark Nick 'the original spy' Fury. Hem-faux-globin. No? They can’t all be winners-" 

Steve stops, taken aback not only because he understood more than one out of ten of those words, but because they're arguing over a clear glass plate covered with Agent Coulson's unsigned trading cards. The man's face flashes into his mind, that calm demeanor stretched thin over a big swelling eagerness to meet his hero, his personal hero, who's just an infantryman half his age, and Steve swallows back the guilt for the hundredth-odd time. 

"I didn't know you kept those," he says uselessly, and they stop, turning to look at him, and then just accept him as if he belongs in the lab full of equipment he couldn't even name.

"Oh, yeah," Tony says. "Let Fury disappear them? Nope. Don't think so." 

"What are you doing with them?" He turns an accusing eye on the glass plate, at a pair of scissors, a scalpel, and several microscope slides sitting entirely too close to the setup for comfort. 

"Blood residue testing. We don't think Phil's dead." 

"--Tony doesn't think Phil's dead," Bruce interjects, giving that little smile that always looks tired, but that's reaching his eyes more and more every day. "And he's talked me into helping him revolutionise forensic science." 

"This isn't Agent's blood," Tony says, brushing off the little technicalities of who-strong-armed-whom-into-what. "They've gone a long way to make sure that's unprovable, but I'm going to prove it, and then we'll make them tell us he's recuperating in Bora Bora and we'll fly down and throw a party." 

"Even if it isn't his blood, that just proves Fury's a jerk," Bruce cautions. "He could still be--" 

"Bruce, come _on_." 

Steve's only barely come around to the idea that the SHIELD agent is actually dead, and Tony's blithe denial and the way they're handling Coulson's things makes his temper fray apart at lightning speed-- he slams his magazine onto the desk between the two men. "What the hell is wrong with you people? Those belong to his _family_. You can't just cut them apart because you're paranoid--" 

"Ooh, we're back to being 'you people', Bruce, he must really be pissed," Tony sneers, and then yelps at a very solid thud from under the table, shoe-against-shin. "Hey, whose side are you on?" 

"Shut up, Tony," Bruce says kindly, and gives Steve a strained, sad look. "We did ask first, if there was any family-- anybody. Fury said no." 

"Actually--" Tony uses that word way too often, usually in tones that get directly under Steve's skin-- "Fury said that Phil bequeathed them to a domestic terrorist who SHIELD doesn't have contact with so we can do whatever with them. Which, by the way, the man is way too confident in his fake blood. For the honor of Stark-and-Banner, we have to crack this thing." 

Steve shoves Stark aside with one hand and leaves him clutching the now-crumpled TIMES indignantly, sweeping the trading cards up carefully into something like order. 

"To hell with Fury," he says, his voice angry and dangerous in his own ears. 

He gets a matched set of shocked looks. He wedges himself into that moment of silence, before Tony can start sputtering at him for messing up his lab. 

"I'm going to find out who Agent Coulson meant to have these," he says grimly. "And I'm going to make sure they get them. Because it's the least, the absolute least I can do." 

"...okay," Bruce says first, his voice even, and Steve only now gets around to wondering if slamming things and shouting at him was the best idea. Bruce’s eyes are brown, his body language is loose, and the little chill going up Steve's spine is at least thirty seconds too late to do any good anyway. 

Bruce ignores his suddenly frozen expression and shoves his glasses up his nose with one finger. "We've got some scrapings, we can keep working. It'll be fine." 

"No, no, not fine, he can't just _take--_ "

"Shut up, Tony," Bruce repeats, and gives the other scientist a smile that disarms him and leaves him scoffing inarticulately. 

"Good." Steve draws himself up and stalks out, stopping at the door to yell "--and we're going to talk about what you said in the article later, Stark!" 

"Oh Christ, not another lecture about wartime taxation--" and then the elevator closes on Tony's whining and Steve exhales, and realizes that his heart is pounding in his chest.

* * *

He carries the cards around on his person all the time until he can meet with Fury. He knows what he’s doing. He’s trying to protect them, as if that will make up for failing to protect their owner, or any of the rest of the people he _hasn’t_ been there to save. Every casualty is too many, worse because it was civilians during the New York invasion, people like the people he’d grown up with who weren’t ever supposed to have the war come to them. 

But they have. So much of New York looks new and big to him, but he knows to other people who grew up in his old city, there’s a gap in the skyline, that war came to them after all, and he wasn’t here, and America’s still at war just like when he crashed into the ice, but now it’s a war that people are bored of, ashamed of. There’s grit all over everything he believed in and he feels like a sideshow act, like he’s been reduced to some smiling stage dancer punching Hitler two shows a night all over again. 

The trading cards are as recent as ‘89-- whoever had the company sure didn’t want to stop making money-- but some of them he saw when they were new, held and signed them and passed them out to wide-eyed kids, and those ones are yellowed and delicate now. Antique. ‘Vintage,’ they’re called, well-preserved relics of a time past. 

He’s not today’s soldier. He doesn’t understand today’s war. America went on without him while he was asleep and he doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere anymore.

* * *

"The terms of the will were extremely clear, and completely unreasonable," Fury says, unmoved by Steve's five minute speech about why Coulson's final wishes should be honored. "We did not stop Agent Coulson from having associations outside our organization, but I'll be damned if I'm sending one of my people to go give that psychopath a pack of bubblegum and some cards. Do you know he's rated at the same threat level as Doctor Banner? Goddamn, Rogers, at least the Hulk can be reasoned with." 

"Who?" Steve asks, frustrated, wishing people could stop assuming that he knows things at any point, could just give him half a chance to catch up. “Who is this guy? Is he honestly someone who'd risk attacking the Avengers?" 

Fury looks at him for a long moment, and slowly raises his eyebrow. 

"The others? In a heartbeat, if he thought they deserved it." 

There's an omission in that statement. 

"And me?" 

Another pause, and Steve doesn't like the way he's being appraised, like Fury’s just had some contrary idea that’s likely to end in tears. He likes the way Fury seems to make up his mind all in a second even less. 

"Forget it, Rogers. Officially, SHIELD has no contact with this individual." Fury looks away, dismissing him without a word, the way he picks up a data tablet as forceful as a kick out the door. 

Steve waits there with his arms crossed for a full two minutes, at which point Fury says, without looking up: "Unofficially, ask Agent Romanoff."

* * *

So here's Steve in a diner in Queens, eating a really good hamburger and wishing he'd listened to Fury. 

Natasha had been happy to help, to slip a message to someone who was going to get a message into some underground river of shared knowledge, to set up a rendezvous. Heck, Tony had come around and let Steve into his archive of stolen SHIELD data, once Steve had let on that it might tick off Fury. 

'That Psychopath' about sums up what Steve saw in SHIELD’s file, and Clint and Natasha, who've known Phil for years, could only shrug when he asked how a guy like Agent Coulson, a patriot, a hero, could be friends with--

"Are you my contact?" 

Steve startles a little, doesn't flinch outwardly, but has to take a second to collect himself and pretend that he’s not surprised to hear the voice nearly right behind him.

He turns to look at the speaker, who's been -- my god, he's been sitting less than ten feet away from Steve eating hashbrowns for the past fifteen minutes, Steve barely noticed him come in but he looks exactly like the photo in his SHIELD file. Which is ten years out of date. It barely shows. There may have been some migration in the gray hairs spattered along the man’s temples, a few wrinkles have spread out like cracks in the earth around his eyes, but the solid core of him is exactly the same. 

The only thing that separates this man from the bogeyman in the tabloids is that he's changed his t-shirt; it's a big baggy touristy affair that says _I ♥ New York_ tucked into his worn BDUs. And it seems that that's all that it takes to make him invisible to the other customers, to turn a mass murderer into just another guy having lunch. Now that Steve's seen him, he can't imagine unseeing him, ever letting this man in the same room with him again without having at least one eye on him and preferably a sidearm.

Age stoops some people, makes others somehow more graceful and proud, but what it's done to Frank Castle is what the wind does to stone out in the desert. Steve looks into his face and thinks that his life has just worn away anything human and exposed cold, carved granite. 

He firms his shoulders. "Yes. I'm your contact. I’m acting on behalf of Phil Coulson." 

"I know who you are. I just can't believe they're letting you talk to me." Castle looks him over, takes Steve in from his head to the tips of his shined shoes, meets his eyes without reacting to the disgust in them. And then-- 

Sun hits the old stone, just for a second, a glimpse of warmth, of a soul behind the legendary bodycount and the brutality and the frozen scowl. "Jesus, you're just a kid," Castle murmurs, as if he’s surprised.

"I'm here on business," Steve says, not breaking eye contact as he reaches into his jacket pocket for the carefully wrapped parcel. "I don't know if you know, but Agent Phil Coulson died in the attack on New York. He wanted you to have these." 

He puts the cards on the table between them, still keeping eye contact, and Castle waits until he's taken his hands away to pick the pile up. He carefully counts the little plastic bags, examines each blood spatter. The images on the stockboard are of Captain America, in his uniform, in the field, posing in front of USO backdrops; Steve barely recognizes it as himself and wonders what he looks like in the flesh, if these cards were all you ever had to know him by. He waits, and Castle finally looks at him again. 

"...you really think he's dead." The inquisitive lift at the end is barely audible but it’s still a question. 

Tony in the lab, Fury's denials, Bruce's uncertainty. Steve doesn't know. 

"I'm not sure. But they read the will." 

Castle reaches into his pocket, and Steve's hand creeps toward the pistol in his waistband, slipping back away when Castle pulls out what used to be a cigarette case, and now holds little plastic-bagged cards a lot like Phil's.

He spreads the ragtag set out across the table, under the others. They're more than a little foxed, these ones, and there's blood on one or two that certainly isn’t fake. 

"We met in the Gulf." Castle's fingertips rest on one of Coulson’s cards, the reddest stained one. "Army and Marines; probably shouldn't have gotten along. But what with one thing and another, he saved my life a few times, I saved his. We swapped stories, traded cards. He knew my family." 

Castle sweeps up the cards in a sharp, efficient motion, tucking them with care into his cigarette pack along with the others, and looks up accusingly. 

"You're saying a few aliens were too much for Phil?" 

"...Loki," Steve says. "He wasn't one of the soldiers that attacked us. He was different, the ringleader. Phil confronted him, one on one, armed with an untested experimental weapon. He was a hero." 

"Loki," Castle repeats thoughtfully, and the chill settles over him again, solidifies him and wipes out whatever human thing was talking to Steve just now. Steve's struck with the thought that Thor had better keep his brother out of sniper’s range of Queens if he wants to keep him at all, godlike alien or not. 

"That's all," Steve says. "Just the cards. Don't contact any of us after this. SHIELD doesn't want anything to do with you, and frankly, mister, neither do I." 

Castle gives him a hollow smile. "Good. You shouldn't." He stands, and tosses a few bills on his table, by his empty plate. 

He nods to Steve, that flash of humanity in his eyes again for just a second as he fires off a crisp, drill-perfect salute. 

Then he's out the door and New York swallows him up like a bitter pill, like he belongs in this city more than Steve does anymore.

Steve sits there for another half hour. And another, drinking the coffee the waitress brings. 

His phone vibrates in his pocket, and he's grateful to have something to do, swiping at the screen and trying to get it to display whatever message it wants to give him. 

It takes some shaking and a lot of finger-wiggling but it finally gives him a screen with a big top bar that says 'TONY' and some text: 

`Capsicle, are you dead? Bruce is worried.` Natasha must have told them that the meeting was today. They're waiting for him, worried for him, his strange little team, as unlikely as-- 

He tries not to think 'as a marine and an army NCO,' 'as a hero and a murderer.' 

"More coffee, hon?" the waitress asks, and he shakes his head, putting his own money down, pocketing the phone.

"No thank you, ma'am. I'm heading home."

**Author's Note:**

> Phil probably isn't dead in this one. But I don't think he minds his pal having his cards for a while. 
> 
> I'm going with a Rucka-esque timeline for the Punisher here-- a Gulf War vet instead of a Vietnam vet. Either way, he's older than Steve, which is a little heartbreaking considering how much Captain America is his hero. There's a story arc that shows a young trainee Frank Castle learning hand to hand from Cap himself before he goes to 'Nam-- he couldn't throw a punch at the guy then and wouldn't later, either. Always loved that about Frank. I think he and Phil could be friends despite the murderous vigilante thing, I really do.
> 
> Oh yeah, Frank's super-camouflage I Heart NY shirt and being ranked up with the Hulk as a threat are both canon. Bless the nasty bastard.


End file.
